Thank you for being a Gates Notes Insider. I feel lucky that I get to connect with so many people like you. – Bill Gates

Not a Gates Notes Insider yet? Sign up

spacer

LOG IN

SIGN UP

EMAILPASSWORD

Forgot?

Log in

Or sign up with your social account:

Log in

Log in

Logout:

Become a Gates Notes Insider

Become a Gates Notes Insider

Join the Gates Notes community to access exclusive content, comment on stories, participate in giveaways, and more.

Already joined? Log in

spacer

LOG IN

SIGN UP

Sign up with your social account:

Sign up

Sign up

Or sign up with email:

TITLE

FIRST NAME

LAST NAME

EMAIL

This email is already registered. Enter a new email, try signing in or retrieve your password

PASSWORD

ADDRESS

Why are we collecting this information? Gates Notes may send a welcome note or other exclusive Insider mail from time to time. Additionally, some campaigns and content may only be available to users in certain areas. Gates Notes will never share and distribute your information with external parties.

ADDRESS LINE 1

Bill may send you a welcome note or other exclusive Insider mail from time to time. We will never share your information.

ADDRESS LINE 2

CITY

STATE / PROVINCE / REGION

ZIP / POSTAL CODE

COUNTRY

Sign up

Join the Gates Notes community to access exclusive content, comment on stories, subscribe to your favorite topics and more.We will never share or spam your email address. For more information see our Sign Up FAQ.By clicking "Sign Up" you agree to the Gates Notes Terms of Use / Privacy Policy.

Deactivating your account will unsubscribe you from Gates Notes emails, and will remove your profile and account information from public view on the Gates Notes. Please allow for 24 hours for the deactivation to fully process. You can sign back in at any time to reactivate your account and restore its content.

Deactivate My Acccount

Go Back

Your Gates Notes account has been deactivated.

Come back anytime.

Welcome back

In order to unsubscribe you will need to sign-in to your Gates Notes Insider account

Once signed in just go to your Account Settings page and set your subscription options as desired.

Sign In

Request account deletion

We’re sorry to see you go. Your request may take a few days to process; we want to double check things before hitting the big red button. Requesting an account deletion will permanently remove all of your profile content. If you’ve changed your mind about deleting your account, you can always hit cancel and deactivate instead.

Submit

Cancel

Thank You! Your request has been sent

Please complete your account verification. Resend verification email.

This verification token has expired.

Your email address has been verified. Update my profile.

Your account has been deactivated. Sign up to re-activate your account.

I couldn’t put down this thriller with a tragic ending

I don’t read a lot of page turners. I often find myself unable to put a book down—but they’re not the kinds of books that would keep most people glued to their chairs. Still, I recently found myself reading a book so compelling that I couldn’t turn away.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou details the rise and fall of Theranos. If you aren’t familiar with the Theranos story, here’s the short version: the company promised to quickly give you a complete picture of your health using only a small amount of blood. Elizabeth Holmes founded it when she was just 19 years old, and both she and Theranos quickly became the darlings of Silicon Valley. She gave massively popular TED talks and appeared on the covers of Forbes and Fortune.

By 2013, Theranos was valued at nearly $10 billion and even partnered with Walgreens to put their blood tests in stores around the country. The problem? Their technology never worked. It never came close to working. But Holmes was so good at selling her vision that she wasn’t stopped until after real patients were using the company’s “tests” to make decisions about their health. She and her former business partner are now facing potential jail time on fraud charges, and Theranos officially shut down in August.

The public didn’t know about Theranos’ deception until Carreyrou broke the story as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Because he was so integral to the company’s demise, Bad Blood offers a remarkable inside look.

Some of the details he shares are—for lack of a better word—insane. Holmes would invite prospective investors to the lab, so they could get their blood tested on a Theranos machine. The device had been programmed to show a really slow progress bar instead of an error message. When results didn’t come back right away, Holmes sent the investors home and promised to follow up with results.

As soon as they left, an employee would remove the blood sample from the device and transfer it to a commercial blood analyzer. Her investors got their blood tested by the same machines available in any lab in the country, and they had no idea.

There’s a lot Silicon Valley can learn from the Theranos mess. To start, a company needs relevant experts on its board of directors. The Theranos board had some heavy hitters—including several former Cabinet secretaries and senators—but for most of the company’s existence, none of them had any expertise in diagnostics. If they had, they might have noticed the red flags a lot sooner.

Health technology requires a different approach than other kinds of technology, because human lives are on the line. Carreyrou writes a lot about how Holmes idolized Steve Jobs and his unwillingness to compromise on his vision. That approach is okay for consumer electronics—if a new phone doesn’t work as promised, no one gets hurt—but it’s irresponsible for a health company. Holmes pushed a vision of what Theranos could be, not what it actually was, and people suffered as a result.

“Bad Blood is a cautionary tale about the virtues of celebrity.”

Bad Blood is also a cautionary tale about the virtues of celebrity. On the surface, Holmes was everything Silicon Valley loves in a CEO: charismatic and convincing with a memorable personal story made for magazine profiles. There’s nothing wrong with that on its own. A rock star CEO can be a huge boon for a startup. But you can’t let fame become the most important thing.

Theranos is the worst-case scenario of what happens when a CEO prioritizes personal legacy above all else—but I hope that people don’t use it as an excuse to write off the next young woman with a big idea. I also don’t want Bad Blood to scare people away from next-gen diagnostics. Theranos went to extraordinary lengths to get around quality standards. The industry is highly regulated, and new diagnostics undergo rigorous testing.

Bad Blood tackles some serious ethical questions, but it is ultimately a thriller with a tragic ending. It’s a fun read full of bizarre details that will make you gasp out loud. The story almost feels too ridiculous to be real at points (no wonder Hollywood is already planning to turn it into a movie). I think it’s the perfect book to read by the fire this winter.